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Monday, August 6, 2012

Speaker-designate of the Florida House Will Weatherford stopped by the RedState Gathering in Jacksonville last Friday to chat with the conservative activists and bloggers who were attending the conference.

What I like about Weatherford is that he isn't just a proud Republican, but that he is consistently cheerful and positive about it, treating politics as a method for finding solutions. He truly believes that conservative principles are the best way to provide the most opportunities for success for the most people, and is dedicated to the idea of making government as simple and streamlined as possible.

While Weatherford was at the Gathering, he was nice enough to chat with me for a few minutes. Here is a video of the interview:

Our future Speaker described his approach to legislating as focused on making Florida the best place to do business:

Everything we do, from our education system, from our health care system, to our criminal justice system, to our economic development investments, everything we do should be geared around creating the best place in America, and hopefully the world, to do business.

Weatherford knows that reforming Citizens Property Insurance is one of my top concerns, and I was glad to hear that it is a priority for him as well:

Long term, the state of Florida has hundreds of billions of dollars, I’m going to say that again, hundreds of billions of dollars...that we are at risk for, we have that much exposure. So we’ve got...to get Citizens to be smaller. A million and a half people on Citizens policies, we’ve got to get that number dramatically lower, we need to get more private sector dollars in here.

…to me, it is an atrocity that we’ve allowed the state to have this exposure, to have this much danger, and not address it yet. Governor Scott and I have talked a lot about it, we both think that we have to address it, and I think you’ll see next session some efforts to do that.

We concluded the interview discussing the 2012 elections and the upcoming GOP convention in Tampa, not far from Weatherford's district. Weatherford has been a Romney supporter since the Florida primary, but he had especially harsh words about the damage that would be caused by a second Obama term:

This is a year that it’s all on the line. We know what four more years of Obama would look like…it would be hard to imagine a recovery from that. Eight more years of Obama and his presidency would really set this country back for a long time.

Weatherford also sat down for an interview with Larry O'Connor for Breitbart TV, discussing his political background, his admiration for Jeb Bush, what it's like to follow in Marco Rubio's footsteps, the upcoming elections, as well as more discussion about his political philosophy. He is clearly proud of the more conservative approach of the Florida House, as compared to the Senate: "The Florida House is the innovative conservative body...we're the idea generators."